Just 50 years ago African Americans were a severely oppressed group. They did not enjoy many of the basic citizenship rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. This was especially true of the American South, where large numbers of black Americans resided. State laws explicitly denied many of these rights to black Americans, and prevailing social customs disregarded them altogether. In the South black people were controlled by an oppressive social system known as the Jim Crow regime. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were denied the franchise, barred from interacting with white Americans in public spaces, and were trapped at the bottom of the economic order, where they were relegated to the poorest-paying and least desirable jobs. This inequality was buttressed by the ideology that black people were genetically and culturally inferior and thus deserved their wretched place in the social order. This racial inequality and ideology were thoroughly entrenched in the fabric of American society because it had reigned supreme over two and a half centuries of slavery and the Jim Crow era, which was established after the brief Reconstruction period that ended in the late nineteenth century. This oppressive system was backed by state laws and violence from white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.